


Auguries of Innocence

by meanwhiletimely



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-18 23:15:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7334881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanwhiletimely/pseuds/meanwhiletimely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The future has many paths. They curve and coil within you, spiraling with possibility — twisting into threads of fate that you can shear or shred at will. All that remains is to decide which path to take.</i>
</p><p>Delphi learns the truth of her parentage and prepares to fly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Auguries of Innocence

**Author's Note:**

> See companion piece [The Augurey Ascending](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7891375) for an alternate version of Delphi's coming-of-age story within the Voldemort Wins timeline.

“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”  
— _William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”_

“Know thyself.”  
— _the dictum of the Oracle of Delphi_  

* * *

The future has many paths.

They curve and coil within you, spiraling with possibility — twisting into threads of fate that you can shear or shred at will. 

Some are sharper and clearer than others, some are blurred and shadowed, and some are blocked entirely, waiting to be opened. Some are for you, and some are for others. Some mirror each other — parallel — or collide at a fork in the road. They are always moving, always shifting, always appearing or disappearing, and you can see them all.

All that remains is to decide which path to take.

* * *

Your magic is different.

The family who has raised you channels, contains, and controls their magic with wands made for them as children. You are a child with magic, but you do not have a wand. Your magic cannot be channeled, contained, or controlled.

It bursts out of you in wild, wandless, wordless blasts of impulse and instinct, and no amount of stolen glances at their spellbooks or stolen moments with their wands will pare it down.

You feel sometimes that there are restrained wings within you, clipped back inside of you, straining at the seams of your skin. You feel sometimes that you could rip yourself open and rise.

The snakes in the garden understand.

They whisper to you, sometimes, through the window.

“Daughter of the air,” they call you, beckoning you out to where they slither free beneath the open sky. You will join them, someday — you will fly away from this tightly controlled house, with these tightly controlled people, and be free with the snakes and the sky.

Until then, you levitate yourself within your bedroom, and you wait.

* * *

Your father is not your father: you have always known this.

The man who is not your father sits locked away in Azkaban, but there is a portrait on display in the foyer, and he looks nothing like you. He is enormous and robust where you are slight and lithe; he is a tawny, blue-eyed blond while you were born alabaster pale with slate grey eyes and a shock of black, black hair.

(The family of blondes who has raised you hates your hair, has always hated it, or so you can only assume — they looked at you once, as a child, after your first show of magic, with something that might have been horror, and that night they Transfigured your hair from black to yellow. 

The Transfiguration did not hold. You woke the next morning with tendrils of ash twisting across your pillow, as grey as your eyes, and no Transfiguration could bring the yellow back.

You tried to bring the black back, with one of their spare wands, but succeeded only in darkening some of the silver strands to blue. It has stayed like that, for years, and will no longer grow any different. Perhaps some parts of spells are stronger than others. Perhaps some parts of you are, too.

Years later, when you first see a picture of a silver-colored Augurey with dark blue feathers on its wings, you will know exactly which parts.)

The family who has raised you will not speak of your mother— _cannot_. An Unbreakable Vow, you’ve gathered from hushed, stolen fragments of conversation: she put you in their care as an infant — had them Vow to keep you safe within their home until her return — and then she died. Now the Vow can never be broken. It has kept you locked away in the Rowle house for fourteen years, safely reading stories about a world full of dangers you yourself will never know.

So maybe you look like _her_ , this dead witch who forced the remaining Rowles into raising her child, who ensured that the man who is not your father would claim you as his own regardless, who abandoned you to a life of safe captivity. Maybe they hate her. Maybe you hate her, too.

Either way, the family who has raised you does not love you, and does not pretend to — love was not part of the Vow.

(It doesn’t matter, of course. You don’t love them, either, and you wouldn’t know how to pretend.)

* * *

One of your earliest memories is of a visit from a queen.

She wasn’t, probably — there are no magical queens, not anymore, not since the days of fairytales — but she _seemed_ like one.

She seemed like the kind of queen who would live in a palace of ice. The kind of queen who would freeze your heart into a diamond.

When she looked at you, your skin felt cold.

A sweep of long blonde hair — not dull Rowle yellow, but fair and flaxen, spun out of gold. The light, ghosting touch of sharp nails across your cheek. White skin and flashing, ice-blue eyes.

“Does anyone know?” Her voice, too, was a queen’s voice: lilting, musical — but haughty and imperious, too.

The Rowles had exchanged looks. “No,” said one of them at last. “Does Lucius?”

You remember the name because it sounds like that of a snake — and you remember the woman who seemed like a queen shaking her head in a way that felt like warning.

“I cannot take her.”

“No,” said the wife of the man who is not your father, wincing. “You cannot.”

“I cannot kill her, either,” the ice queen had said, tearing those pale blue eyes away from you once more. “Can you?”

You had looked to the family who raised you — calm and cold — and they had looked back, the blood rushing out of their faces.

“Not while the Vow remains unbroken.”

“Not while you live,” corrected the woman who seemed like a queen. The Rowles went pale as you both, at that. She swept toward the door in a whirl of white and gold, leaving a rush of cool air in her wake. “So we wait.”

You grow up with the knowledge that a queen would like you dead. 

You grow up with the knowledge that she and Death are waiting — patient — for the day that you take the wrong path.

* * *

The man who is not your father sits locked away in Azkaban, and once a year, his family visits.

You stay at the house, of course, alone, and speak to the snakes in the garden. 

(They will only speak to you when you are alone.

“Why?” you ask them, once — soft, so as not to startle. Snakes, you have found, startle easily. “Are you afraid of them? The Rowles?”

“No,” say the snakes, and there is laughter in their sibilation. “They are afraid of you.”)

This year, though — your fourteenth, only three months after your birthday — you stop them at the door and see them turn to look at you with something perilously close to dread.

“If you go there today,” you tell them (soft, like to the snakes), “you’ll die.”

You know it’s true. You’ve seen it. A revenge attack — the angry, still-grieving lover of a long-ago victim of the man they are leaving to visit. Death is ready, eager, hovering over them like a levitated shroud.

There is no other path. If they want to live, they must not take it.

But they do, as you know they will. They look at you, then at each other, shaking their heads with almost indiscernible despair — and they go.

They do not come back.

* * *

When the Ministry clerk arrives at the door, she is shorter and younger than you expected — shorter and younger than she looked when you saw her approaching in your mind.

“Delphi Rowle?” she asks uncertainly. You nod, and her features twist together hideously in a way that makes you think she might cry. You hope she doesn’t. She might expect you to cry, too.

Sitting in the living room, where you’ve been practicing spells with all the spare wands in the house, she tells you your family is dead.

“Not my father.” You glance over to where the man who is not your father watches from his portrait in the foyer. He will not meet your eyes.

The Ministry clerk nods, looking pained. “Thorfinn Rowle remains in Azkaban. Yes.”

“Can I visit him there?” It’s going to start raining outside, in just a few minutes. You imagine running in the rain, _flying_ in the rain, sailing over stormy seas. “Can I leave?” 

She blinks, taken entirely aback. You’ve unsettled her. “Of course,” she says carefully. “You’re not a prisoner yourself. You can leave whenever you like.”

It hits you like a staggering blow to the chest: _You can leave whenever you like_. The family who has raised you is as dead as your mother. The Vow is broken. You are no longer safe. You are free.

“Delphi,” the Ministry clerk is asking, slow and cautious, glancing around at the spellbooks and wands, “why were you not sent to Hogwarts?”

“It wasn’t safe,” you say, distracted. Raindrops have started to fall. You stand, and the Ministry clerk stands, too, blocking your path to the door. Your eyelids narrow into slits. “You said I could leave.”

“You can,” she says, smiling in a way you suspect she intends to be reassuring. It only makes her come off rather strangled. “We’ll find you someplace to go — someone to look after you. For now, though, why don’t we continue our little chat? The Ministry has just a few questions—”

“I want to see my father.”

“Your father is a Death Eater,” the clerk says sharply, then winces, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. You pick up a wand and hold it behind your back. “It’s not your fault,” she says, opening her eyes. “None of it is your fault. But with things the way they are now…” She trails off, at a loss, then shakes her head. “It’s dangerous, Delphi, to be the daughter of a Death Eater.”

You point the wand between her eyes. They widen, stunned, as she reaches for her own wand — but you’ve already spoken the charm.

_Confundo._

She will leave, having done her duty. The Rowle girl is taken care of — sent off to a Muggle orphanage, poor thing. She’s a Squib. Very tragic. No need to worry about a vengeful little Death Eater, though. No need to worry at all.

And you — _you_ step outside into the rain, pouring now, whirling around until you’re soaked and dripping in a mad, laughing frenzy, the snakes rising up from the garden to circle at your heels.

The world is dangerous, but so are you — and all your paths are open.

* * *

You go to Azkaban.

The island prison’s bars and stones have become the building blocks of all your waking visions; every path before you starts there.  
(Some paths end there, too.)

The stories you have heard and read led you to expect Dementors. There are none. There are only human guards, these days; easy to lie to, easy to charm — it’s all so _easy_ , now. You’re here to see your father, so they take you to him, and leave you alone at the cell.

Fourteen years into life imprisonment, Thorfinn Rowle is smaller than he looms in his portrait — yellow hair thinned, blue eyes haunted — but he still will not look at you. He stares at a spot on the floor, rocking slowly, chanting something under his breath. It might be a song, or a spell.

“Father,” you say clearly, trying out the word. It rings out into the silence of the stones, then echoes back at you. _Father. Father._ The man who is not your father doesn’t glance up.

“He doesn’t know you,” comes a voice from behind you — low and rough, in a discordant upper-class accent. “He doesn’t know anyone, now.”

You turn.

The man in the cell across from Thorfinn Rowle's is old enough to be your father, too, but there is nothing familial in the sharp, worn lines of his wolf-like features: fathomless and hard, like an impenetrable stone mask. There are traces of ravaged elegance and ruined beauty there — a lethal kind of elegance, a feral kind of beauty. He reminds you of a werewolf in a fairytale, the kind who entices young girls to him in the woods.

“Who are you?” you ask, meeting his inscrutable eyes. Something ravenous flickers across them when you do — if you were a different kind of girl, you’d shiver.

“My name is Rodolphus Lestrange.”

The name strikes a strange, familiar chord. “Do I know you?”

He almost smiles. “No.”

You study him, grasping at the threads inside you, searching — but he’s already speaking again.

“Your father is not your father.” You nod. You have always known this. He’s watching you closely, the granite ghost of a smile still playing upon the edges of his mouth. “Do you know who your father was, Delphini?” 

You have not told Rodolphus Lestrange your name.

Your feet move toward his cell as if compelled. “Do you?” He doesn’t answer — only bares sharp teeth. You step closer. “Who was my father?”

He motions you to him. You lean in — and Rodolphus Lestrange’s hand lurches between the bars to wrap itself around your throat.

You do not struggle. You do not scream. You go rigid as stone yourself as he pulls you close and whispers in your ear.

_“You Know Who.”_

* * *

All your paths have converged into one. Perhaps there were never truly any others.

Every missed insinuation — every unseen hint — every unthinkable whisper — all come crashing down upon you with the force of a cataclysmic storm.

His name was never spoken in the Rowle house. You long ago gathered that it was not spoken anywhere. The Dark Lord, the Rowles called him, in the rare times they spoke of him at all, and always with an anxious glance at _you.  
_ (Because you were a child, you had thought. Because you were _his_ child, you had not thought to guess.)

Or, still rarer, _other_ names, names they assumed you would not infer the meaning of: He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. You Know Who.

 _Seven years since the Dark Lord’s fall, and the Malfoys still walk free._  
_So do we._  
_Do we?_  
A furtive glance to where you’re sitting with your storybooks, pretending not to hear.

 _Potter says he was a half-blood — He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. What would_ she _say to that, I wonder?  
_ An eruption of spiteful, bitter laughter, dissolving into silence when they see you at the door.

 _It’s we, in the end, who are You Know Who’s most faithful.  
_ A significant, ironic look exchanged across the table, arriving, as always, on you.

Who, then, was You Know Who?

You tear apart the empty Rowle house seeking answers: slashing through the wallpaper, smashing through the floorboards, blasting holes into the ceiling, until your gaze finally rests upon the portrait of Thorfinn Rowle.

“I am not to blame”, he pleads as you approach him — meeting your eyes at last. “You know I had no choice.”

You respond by ripping him to shreds.

Hidden behind the portrait is a crevice in the wall.  
Hidden within the crevice is every ruinous piece of evidence the Rowles would not or could not destroy.

Silver masks. Black hoods. Cursed jewelry and stolen artifacts. Charred, charmed letters and blackened, bewitched photographs. Books with especially significant subjects and newspapers with particularly damning headlines — most recent, most relevant, most obviously kept away from your eyes.

It’s in those that you find what you’re looking for.  
It’s in those that you read about Lord Voldemort.

Lord Voldemort: the leader of the Death Eaters, who brought the wizarding world to its knees.

Lord Voldemort: the most powerful Dark wizard of all time, who split his soul into eight pieces.

Lord Voldemort: the Heir of Slytherin, who claimed to be descended from Salazar himself.

Lord Voldemort: a Parselmouth, who bent serpents to his will.

“Who am I?” you demand of the snakes in the garden — a rushing in your ears, a desperate pounding in your heart. “Why do you speak to me?”

“You spoke to us first,” they say, laughing. “Daughter of the air.”

But that’s not what they’re saying, though, is it?

Daughter of the air — _daughter of the Heir._

The snakes crawl over your shoulders. Something inside you takes flight.

* * *

The Heir of Slytherin made the Heirs of all the other ancient Houses call him Master.

A daughter of the _most_ ancient House called him Master, too.

Bellatrix Black Lestrange blinks out from a page in _The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord_ with stormy, slate grey eyes.

It’s like looking into a mirror.

* * *

You return to Azkaban. 

The real-life Thorfinn Rowle still does not know you, but Rodolphus Lestrange is waiting — expectant and entirely unsurprised — the moment you appear before his cell.

“You were married to my mother.”

“Yes.” 

“Did you love her?”

“Yes.”

You search his unfathomable face for falsehood and find none. You have found no grave, either — no tangible relics of her life or death. “Did you bury her, before you were captured?”

“No,” he replies, with taciturn shortness. “They burned her.” A precarious pause. “With him.”

Your parents are ashes, intermingled in death. She would like that, you think. He would not.

“The books — the press — they call her his most faithful servant. They call her his…companion.” They call her other things, too, things you have thought but will refrain from speaking. You suspect that Rodolphus, at some point, has spoken them. 

“She loved him,” he says simply, still wearing that impassive mask of stone. You shake your head.

“She betrayed him.” She failed — she fell — she died. You meet her husband’s hungry eyes. “She betrayed you, too.”

Rodolphus is silent a long moment, digging dirty nails into the scarred serpent on his forearm — drawing blood. “He was her god,” is all he says at last. “Is it betrayal, to love a god who cannot love? To die for him?”

You do not — cannot — answer.

If the Dark Lord was a god, he is a dead god, now. 

What does that make you?

* * *

There is a document in the Rowle house that you’ve never more than glanced at until now: _The Pureblood Directory_ , it’s called, listing all the sacred bloodlines of magical Britain. There are twenty-eight. The Rowles are among them, but among the last — they are not wizarding nobility, like the Malfoys or the Lestranges. They are not wizarding royalty, like the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.

(Is that what you are, then? Half-royalty, half-god? Half-blood.

You wonder if you’ll ever manage to piece all your halves together.  
You wonder if you’ll ever manage to feel whole.)

 _The Pureblood Directory_ does not list Slytherin among its sacred bloodlines, because Slytherin is most sacred of them all. Salazar coined the term _Pureblood_. Salazar sought to Purify the world, and Salazar died before the world could be Purified. He left behind no son but the Heir who was prophesied: the descendant who would carry out his vision, who would drive the magical world to greatness in his stead. The successor who would speak in his Tongue.

The female bloodline, then, you understand — oh yes, you understand.

There were no Slytherins after Salazar, but the Dark Lord was his Heir, and that can only mean one thing: Salazar Slytherin had a daughter.

You call the snakes in from the garden.

They hiss. They writhe. They bite.

* * *

You return to Azkaban — again, again, again.

Rodolphus Lestrange does not seem to age, but you do: you grow taller, shapelier, stronger.  
Soon, you’ll have to stop hiding. (Soon, hiding won’t be a problem.)

“Why do I exist?” you ask, twirling a strand of silver hair and noting the way Rodolphus follows it with his eyes. “Why did he allow me to be born?”

“You’re a seer, are you not?” Your surprise must show on your face, because he gives a caustic laugh. “What do you see?”

“Deaths. Storms. Paths to the future.” You tilt your head, considering him. “All of yours end here, in Azkaban.”

To that, he makes no comment.

You lean closer, wrapping your hands around the bars. “Was it intended, then, for me to be this way?”

“What do you think?” asks Rodolphus. “You know him well enough by now, your _father_.” The edge of amusement in his voice is not entirely benign. “The Dark Lord loved his prophecies.”

“Tell me,” you entreat him — soft and pleading. You lean against the bars so that your shirt pulls tight against your chest, and observe with cold satisfaction his slight intake of breath. “You’re all I have, Rodolphus.”

He stands very still for a moment, then steps forward, lowering his voice. “A powerful seer was prophesied to sit at his side. A new kind of oracle — an Augurey.”

“Augurey,” you repeat, the word feeling strangely vitalizing on your tongue.

He nods. “Born on the second day of the second month.” 

Your birthday.

“But he died.”

Rodolphus’s mouth twists sharply. “He certainly did. What does that tell you about prophecies?”

“That there are _more_ ,” you say breathlessly — thinking quickly. Watching the paths rearrange. “That can’t be all of it. The rest of it is out there. I’ll find it. I’ll fulfill it. I’ll — I’ll bring him back.”

A growling laugh jolts you out of your vision — Rodolphus is looking at you with a wild, half-deranged smile. You think you might be seeing the inevitable crack in the mask. 

“You’re her, all over again.” He lets out another low laugh, still staring, and it occurs to you to wonder if Rodolphus Lestrange might be mad. “When I see you — I see her.” He wrenches you to him suddenly, rough hands reaching out to tighten around your waist, the bars digging into your bones. “She lives, through you.”

You feel him open your lips with his tongue, feel him breathe her into your mouth. _“Bella_. _”_

“Release me.” You hiss it in Parseltongue, savor the way his grip goes soft and his eyes go slack with terror at the sound, then throw him back against the far cell wall with the flick of a finger — no wand, no incantation. Rodolphus Lestrange hits stone with a crack and a groan.

“Bow,” you tell him now, bending your finger, pulling him up to his knees. You smile. “Crawl.”

He does — inching toward you, panicked and pained — until he’s prostrate at your feet, gazing up at you: trembling, imploring. You imagine this is the way your mother looked, kneeling before your father. You imagine this is exactly the way he wanted her.

You encircle your hand around his left forearm and press your fingers to the faded serpent until it flares to scorching life, until all his veins and nerves are burning, until he screams and the guards come running.

Only then do you remind him, hissed into his ear— “Her Lord lives through me, too.”

* * *

When you come of age on your seventeenth birthday, it seems fitting to Mark the occasion.

Not in the way your father might have done — no serpent and skull for you.

You are no Death Eater.  
You are his Augurey.

You burn two wings onto your shoulders — black like your hair used to be.

Your father transformed himself, spell by spell, into the serpents he commanded.  
You will complete your own transformation. You will finally take flight.

You are the answer the wizarding world has been waiting for — the answer to every question they have not even thought to ask.

The future, after all, can change. Time, after all, can reverse.

Your path is clear.

There will be no more waiting. There will be no more hiding.

You formulate a plan.

* * *

If this were a fairytale, your mother would come to you, now, in a dream — to give you advice, or a warning. _Your_ mother, however, does not seem the dream-dispatch type.

Perhaps a fairy godmother, then: a woman who looks just like her, but lighter, gentler, somehow. You think you might have seen her in a dream, once. You think she might have had a soft, sad smile.

In any case, it’s pointless. You realized that this is no fairytale a long, long time ago.

The ice queen, by the way, is dead. 

Isn’t that funny?

She and Lucius both — an illness in their Pure, thin blood. Lucius went first, before his cold, golden wife. 

If you imagine this as a fairytale, she died because she could not live without him — she died of a broken heart.

(You are fortunate this is no fairytale. 

In fairytales, poison is far too common. In real life, no one even thinks to suspect.)

Their Heir survives, and his Heir.  
Two Black constellations, still shining beside _Gamma Delphini_ in the sky.

Eventually, you will pay the younger one a visit — the new Heir to the House of Malfoy. _Scorpius_.

(Some say he is truly the Dark Lord’s child.

The first time you hear this, you laugh and laugh and laugh.  
The second time you hear this, it is no longer amusing.

You will pay him a visit, yes — and eventually, the world will know exactly what the Dark Lord’s child can do.)

* * *

You were right, in the end: there was more to the prophecy. 

You are not at all surprised when you realize who is referenced by the rest of it — whose fate is threaded irrevocably with yours.

The dead god’s daughter and the son of the boy who destroyed him, named for the men who made that destruction possible.

_Albus Severus Potter._

Of course.

You leave behind the Rowle house, stepping out into the garden one last time. The snakes slither toward you, sibilant across the grass: _Daughter of the Heir._

Looking up at the sky, you see grey clouds gone dark as your eyes. There’s going to be a storm.

You reach out your arms in concentration, feeling all that wild, unfettered magic bubbling up within you: ready to surge, ready to burst, ready to rip the fabric of the world asunder.

The wings split apart your skin in a dizzying eruption of pain and exhilaration. Your ascent has you searing, soaring. You feel like a burning pyre.

You rise. You rise. You rise.

**Author's Note:**

>  **UPDATE** : _This was written a month before reading the Cursed Child script book, so a month before having access to all the details re: Delphi's character. There are therefore a few aspects of this story that are no longer canon-compliant (e.g. Euphemia Rowle taking Delphi in for 'gold' and keeping an Augurey bird in a cage at the Rowle house, Rodolphus being apparently released from Azkaban rather than serving a life sentence, etc.) — though I suppose we could assume that Delphi was only speaking manipulatively/metaphorically to Albus and Scorpius when describing certain aspects of her childhood, or that she misspoke in excitement when telling "Voldemort" about meeting Rodolphus. Everything else should still work._


End file.
